Hello Miles!

30 Dec 04 06:14, you wrote to me:

 MM>> There might be more than chance to that ... my memory of Abel
 MM>> Tasman's first map of the area used a Dutch name like "Nieeuw
 MM>> Zeeland" in 1642,  and I'm sure that there was an established
 MM>> `Zeeland' at the antipode...

 BS>> Aha. Ours is beeing called "Sjalland" in the native
 BS>> langauge, but Zealand in English. Zeeland means "The land
 BS>> of lakes" in Dutch? "Sjalland" can't be
translated to that.
 BS>> Not sure of what it means acutally.

 MM> That's interesting -  Apparently Tasman thought he'd found an
 MM> extension of South America and named NZ "Staten Landt" at first,
 MM> but when SA was shown not to extend to the west, the Dutch renamed
 MM> NZ  "Nieeuw Zeeland" in 1643 - and it stuck.

Aha. But Tasmania is a part of Austrailia right?

 MM> "The land of lakes" is not so silly, either.  The bits of NZ that
 MM> Tasman visited feature a set of islands that hid the Cook Strait
 MM> entirely from the Dutch explorers,  and gave Captain Cook a false
 MM> steer into the bargain.

false steer?

 MM> But I suspect that some bit of Holland or its neighbourhood was
 MM> also called `Zeeland' at the time  -  and somewhere close to the
 MM> true antipode of NZ would make a lot of sense of the `New'...

Right. :) "Zealand" is a state/county in the netherlands. It
located in the south west of Holland no far from Belgium border.

Bo


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